Bio:

If you’re reading this, they already got to me. I’ve encoded this in to the deep Resonance so only another Otaku can find it; if you are one of those Corps traitors who sold out your people for a quick check, you can piss right off. If you’re not, pay attention, because this is what they want to do to all of us.

You’re probably wondering who I am by now. Well, I haven’t used my real name in years, but you wouldn’t know it anyway. My friends call me Malachi, but I doubt you know that name either. If you have heard of me, it was probably on the ‘trix where I go by Wraith. Don’t laugh, I was a kid. And then.. well, it seemed to fit.

People ask me sometimes if I remember the Night of Rage. Of course I don’t, I was an infant. But I’ve sure learned about it since then. It dominated my life for a long time, in some ways, it made me who I am. My parents and I were there, along with every other minority in Seattle they could round up “for our protection”. We all know how that turned out. I was one of the lucky ones, my parents weren’t. I learned all I could about them when I was a bit older. All I could wasn’t a lot, which means they did their job well: they were low-level ’runners, working for a dwarf gang out of Seattle.

That gang took me in after they died, and I started doing small jobs for them when I was still pretty young, but that all changed in the ‘50s. The Matrix wasn’t anything new by this point, but we were way out of the city, and I’d really never been exposed to it, so when I Emereged, I had no idea what was going on. I got lucky again, I Called some Sprites to me that turned out to be benevolent, they helped me work through what was going on and even taught me how to control my new gifts. And my gang put those gifts to work right away. For a while, we were even on the radar as a serious player in the Seattle underground because of what I was able to do, but it didn’t last. You’ve all heard this story before. Corp security gets better, and worse, I was Fading. Losing my Resonance. I tried to hold on to it for as long as I could, but by the time I was 18 I couldn’t even compile a Sprite anymore. Before I was 20 it was all gone.

I couldn’t even log on to the Matrix for years after that, it hurt too much remembering how it used to be. Commlinks and datajacks felt too strange to me. And I wasn’t much use in the meat world either. The gang supported me for a while, but without my skills to protect them, Lone Star came knocking, and we had to split. Then Crash 2.0 happened, and the new Technomancers started appearing, and the Corps started putting out bounties for Technomancers, and my gang decided they needed the nuyen more than they needed a useless, washed up dwarf, so they sold me out.

I was bought by Renraku and taken to an island in the Pacific Rim. Don’t bother looking for it, they paid a great deal of money to have it removed from every map, satellite feed, GPS locator, you name it, it doesn’t show up there. Don’t be surprised, every Corp has these blacker-than-black facilities for projects like this. They interviewed me, locked me up, and subjected me to over a year of drug therapy. Somewhere in there, their tests worked, and they reawakened my Otaku powers. That was when I met Ebisu.

Ebisu was an AI that Renraku was using to control the facility I was in. At some point, completely unexpectedly, Ebisu became sensitive to the Resonance and was able to sense things that normally only Otaku could. I can only theorize this has something to do with having some many Otaku in close proximity, Ebisu became attuned to a sort of Resonance Well. But since my first fading I have been way out of the loop on the theories, so I really have no idea. What is important about all of this is that he and I were able to communicate with each other off of Renraku’s grid, and I learned that he wanted out as much as I did, so we formed a plan.

We let me get discovered talking to him, so they disconnected me and threw me in solitary confinement for a month. Ebisu reconnected me, and I spent that month compiling and bargaining with a group of Sprites to help in our escape. This was exhausting, and when they took me back to the testing area, they discovered that I was fading, so they sent me to recover. That gave me another couple of months to finish putting the plans together, to send my Sprites out to probe their system, creating all sorts of little backdoors for me to use. Finally I was ready to make my move. I let all my Sprites go off to cause mayhem, I disabled security across the entire facility, caused a few distractions, and made my way to the core area. I downloaded Ebisu to a storage chip and we left. My Sprites got out of hand, though. I found out later that they took their instructions to “cause a distraction” a bit to literally, and they ended up torching the whole facility. I was gone, so I couldn’t do anything, but I still think about all the other Otaku in there. I meant to go back and save them, and now I can’t do anything.

Ebisu and I intentionally left behind any evidence that could be traced back to Renraku. If we had that information, they would come after us, and we only wanted to be left alone. I uploaded him to the Matrix, and he is off lying low somewhere, reorienting himself.

So that is how I came to be. If you’re hearing this, Renraku came after me anyway. I plan on laying low and hoping this all blows over, but I don’t know how those people think. I can’t offer you any evidence to use against them, but hopefully this points you in the right direction and you can find something.